MGE included a lot of features which haven't been replicated in OpenMW yet. For example, among these were the ability to generate distant statics and land meshes, which enabled view distances as large as 20 cells away without overwhelming performance loss on modern hardware. It was possible to see all the way from Vivec to Red Mountain, which had a wonderful effective of always giving you a sight line on the looming threat from the bad guy. Just wondering if features like this will be included in the upcoming releases.

Probably. Graphics improvements are not 1.0 blockers and have a low priority.
So if someone will find a time to implement these features, then yes. But last time I checked, only shadows were in progress.

For instance, the water shader in OpenMW is a little more capable than MGE XE's, as it can dynamically reflect creatures and other actors.
The upcoming shadow work is visually stunning, and everything casts a dynamic shadow (except for the player in first person mode) Which includes statics, terrain and all creatures, activators and actors.
Distant terrain has been implemented, and is generated dynamically when activated (No need for a separate wizard like in MGE) and if you crank up the view distance, I can see all the way to Stirk from Port Telvannis. Distant statics have not been implemented yet.

In some ways, we're already more advanced than MGE, but there's still work to be done.